About

Wake Me Up When September Ends is a ballad by American punk rock trio Green Day from their 2004 album American Idiot. Similar to It's Gonna Be May, the song's title lyric has inspired a series of time-specific jokes in which people remind each other every September that singer Billie Joe Armstrong is asleep and needs to be awakened on October 1st.

Origin

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is about the death of Armstrong's father.^[1] It was released as the fourth single off American Idiot on June 13th, 2005. It peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its video, shown below, shows a young couple torn apart by the Iraq War and has nearly 90 million views as of September 1st, 2016.

The meaning behind the name stems from Billie Joe Armstrong's father dying in September 1982 when he was just 10. According to the story behind it, Armstrong ran home from his father's funeral, crying and locking himself in his room. When his mother went to check on him later, he told her, "Wake me up when September ends."^[12]

Spread

"Wake up Billie Joe" jokes began in the first September after the song was released as a single. For example, one of the joke's earliest known uses occurred in a blog post on mikezeller.blogspot.com,^[3] when Zeller posted "wake up billie joe…" on September 30th, 2005 (shown below).

The joke didn't begin gaining widespread popularity until the 2010s, however. A thread on the music website Drowned in Sound^[2] posted by Lucien on October 1st, 2010, asked if anyone had remembered to "wake up Billie Joe." A similar thread was posted to IGN^[4] on October 1st, 2011.

Since then, the joke has regularly appeared around social media and in news publications. Image macros began appearing as early as 2010.^[6] An e-card was posted in 2012 and has gained 4.6 thousand shares in four years.^[7]

The meme was soon applied to Advice Animals including Good Guy Greg (below, left), Slowpoke (below, center), and Overly Attached Girlfriend (below, right).

Uncyclopedia^[5] included October 1st, 2005, in notable October anniversaries for being the first time someone had to wake up the guy from Green Day. The joke has returned every year since 2010 and is popular on Twitter^[8] and Facebook.^[9]

The meme spread throughout the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s as it became an annual meme each September and October, being referenced in a wide array of meme formats.

For example, on September 30th, 2019, Redditor chicachibi shared an Epic Handshake meme referencing the song and the start of Spooktober to the /r/memes^[14] subreddit, garnering over 25,000 upvotes and 90 comments in seven years.

On September 30th, 2021, a since-deleted Redditor posted a meme of SpongeBob waking up to the /r/dankmemes^[15] subreddit, receiving over 2,300 upvotes and 20 comments in five years.

On September 30th, 2025, Redditor avrahta shared a Whomst Has Awakened The Ancient One meme about Billie Joe Armstrong waking up when the month ended, garnering nearly 900 upvotes and 20 comments in a year.

Backlash and Acknowledgement of Memes

Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" experienced recurring spikes in popularity around the beginning and end of September, largely driven by memes about waking Billie Joe Armstrong when the month ends. Although the memes have been criticized as insensitive because the song was inspired by the death of Armstrong's father, Armstrong has occasionally acknowledged the joke himself, including during a 2016 interview and in a 2023 promotional video.

On November 4th, 2016, Vulture^[10] released a video with Billie Joe Armstrong discussing the memes, which had already proliferated on platforms like Twitter for years. During the interview, Armstrong stated:

"It’s like when Jesus was born on December 25, people go, 'Hey, it’s Christmas time.' When the Easter Bunny comes, people go, 'Hey, it’s Easter.' When September comes, people go, 'Hey, it’s that guy in Green Day.' I want to say have fun, but get a life at the same time. I’m going to write a new song. It’s called 'Shut the Fuck Up When October Begins.'"

The annual joke continued garnering negativity despite its spread into the 2020s, such as an NME^[11] article titled "Green Day fans are over the ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ joke," published on October 2nd, 2021, that highlighted how Armstrong originally wrote the song about his father passing away and how some fans disliked the memes.

On October 1st, 2023, Green Day posted a video to the band's official X / Twitter^[13] account that showed Armstrong waking up in bed and looking at a calendar that read, "Wake me up!" on October 1st, acknowledging the meme again. The post received over 796,000 views, 9,100 likes and 150 replies in three years.

It’s October 1st, WAKE UP ⏰ now go hit snooze on https://t.co/8sgEStWYFV pic.twitter.com/ioKFcrVbst

— Green Day (@GreenDay) October 1, 2023

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References